In other news, Google Suggest has just emerged from BETA! So, jump on over and start using it: [visit link]

I still have a few problems with it though, the main one being the following: When typing in a multiple-word query and wanting to delete just the first word of that query, doing so using keyboard shortcuts (home, ctrl + shift + RightArrow) to select just the first word, selects the entire query and deletes it.

Of course, doing this with a mouse is not a problem, but it's annoying as hell when doing it with a keyboard. This is also true with middle words if you select them from the left.

These graphs don't actually give you very useful information because you can't tell what the units are. And they're obviously cooking the numbers in some fashion if the overall volume for searches on subjects is not going up between 2004 and 2006.

Or perhaps the graphs represent searches as a percentage of total searches? It's really hard to tell what you're looking at.

It is an interesting tool, but I have one question about it.

Why is it that for pretty much everything, the search volume has decreased over time? Is this because there is less accurate or different data for older searches, or perhaps Google isn't quite as popular today as it was a couple of years ago? I mean, one would think that for most things the search volume should increase over time since more and more people are getting onto the internet and using search engines...

My nomination for Google Trend of the Week would be Slashdot-Digg. Here's how it turns out: [visit link]

[From the Google Trends instructions] "just type in up to five topics, separated by commas, and you can see the cities, regions or languages that have had the 'top results' for each topic, along with Google news articles."

Why the breakdowns for cities, regions, or languages..but not by time-of-search? This makes it impossible to answer such crucial social research questions as: do as many people search for "porn" during the day as during the evening/night?

Any math teacher will tell you: a graph without a scale is like an eagle without wings. How long will it be before we start seeing real numbers attached to the graphs in Google Trends?

Steve Rubel's comparison is the best use of Google Trends yet. Brilliant!